Youth Sexuality, Reproductive Health, and Rights

In the Headlines

22 September 2011

Ending Child Marriage: A Crucial Step Toward Gender Equality

Monika Mitchell, CEO of Good Business International, writes about the launch of “Girls Not Brides,” a Ford collaboration with foundations, federal agencies and corporations, which aims to end the practice of child marriage in one generation. Speaking at the initiative’s launch at the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting, Ford Foundation President Luis Ubiñas emphasized that the problem of child marriage has economic roots: “It’s about poverty...about not getting that fifth bowl of rice.”

Girls Just Want to be Girls

September 21, 2011By Monika Mitchell

You might think a nine year old girl is too young to be married, but in some parts of the world, this is the common age of betrothal. The odds are that for ten million of the world’s adolescent and teenage girls one in three girls marry before age 18 and one in seven marry before age 15 — even as astonishingly young as age nine. “Girls Not Brides,” a joint effort to end child marriage, was announced yesterday at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) under the direction of Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson of “The Elders,” Luis Ubiñas of the Ford Foundation and Jennifer Buffett of NoVo Foundation. .